WASHINGTON — A court in Luxembourg has ruled against a group of Sept. 11 victims in a novel lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in Iranian assets, bringing to a head a long growing disagreement about a significant question of international law: Should governments be immune from lawsuits even when they are accused of responsibility for terrorist attacks?
For decades after World War II, as the modern international order was established, the United States stood in alignment with the world by restrictively interpreting “sovereign immunity,” the principle that people generally cannot sue governments. But starting with a 1996 law and expanding in the post-9/11 era, Congress has made it easier for victims of terrorist attacks to file such lawsuits.
Taking advantage of that exception, survivors and relatives of people killed by attacks linked to Iranian operatives — such as the 1983 truck bombing of a Marine base in Beirut, Lebanon — have used American courts to file lawsuits against Iran. Iran has failed to show up in court to contest them, and judges have entered more than $50 billion in default judgments.
Those judgments are largely symbolic so long as there is no way for victims to enforce them and obtain the money that judges say Iran owes them. But after the deal with six world powers in 2015 in which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions, billions in Iranian assets started to become available in Europe, which generally enforces judgments from American courts.
